Hacked: The Streamer is a choose-your-own-adventure game from developer Button Interactive and NAISU. The game is described on their site as “You are blackmailed in Hacked: The Streamer. Investigate clues, make impactful decisions, and shape your story to uncover the culprit in this thrilling interactive movie”. Sounds interesting, right? Let’s jump in and see how it plays from publishers Game Dev.ist and Gamersky Games.

Starting off, you have two game modes you can choose from: Rookie, with fewer clues to finding the culprit but more for the people that enjoy the storyline, and Detective, for those that are up for a challenge, as you need to collect all clues to accuse someone.

The game starts with the background to the streamer you will play as, PinkyPie or her real name, Beril. The previous day, you had a stream with 20,000 viewers and received a sponsorship deal worth a lot of money.

As this cutscene continues, it shows a hacker downloading private images of you, providing some context for what’s about to happen. As you progress, there are various back stories you are introduced to before you start your next stream, from jolted ex-boyfriends, male friends, and even your brother Efe, who is a police prosecutor, so you can start to see how the story will begin to intertwine.

You are then introduced to Pinky’s stream team, who also play their part in the story. Pinky’s mother is very sick, and her brother is currently looking after her. Pinky had been hoping to use the newly found sponsorship money to help her mother with her medical bills and treatment, not to be bribed by a hacker for it; that’s how the developers draw you in and play to your empathetic side.

As you stream, you are given two to four options to choose when the storyline stops, making you think about what direction you want to go based on the current scene, but don’t take too long, as you do have a time limit to make the decision, to try and keep the situation tense and engaging. All your decisions and evidence are stored in an “evidence book”; each page has a character’s name on it that you interact with, and the evidence you come across is stored on the pages.

A story tree also helps you as you go along, providing a visual indication of the event timeline. Both of these story items let you go back to them at any time, which is handy if you need to revisit certain events when making decisions. You also have some trinkets on your desk that you can interact with; they will give you flashbacks to how you acquired them and help you find clues throughout the storyline. As you gather enough evidence, you can use this to accuse the person you believe to be the one who is trying to blackmail you.

The game does have multiple endings based on your decision, even if you get it wrong. If you make the wrong decision, the game will revert you to essentially your last saved neutral position, so you don’t have to complete the whole story again, which I like.

You do have some mini games you play as you progress through the story, but they are very basic and feel more like an afterthought to try and keep you engaged by clicking the screen, not just reading the storyline. There are 14 steam unlocks as you progress through the story.

The graphics are real videos, mostly full-motion video like a movie, and it plays through essentially like a movie; the only difference is that you are making the decisions about where the storyline goes. The characters are meaningful, and the story is very engaging, but it would appear English isn’t their first language, as a few characters can be quite monotone in the dialogue.

Most gamers will be able to relate to the content as well as the game uses common platforms in its storyline, like Twitch and Discord, showing their setup on the screen and also their audio notifications noises most of us have heard thousands of times before. The game is over 18 gig in size, which gives you a good indication of how much FMV playtime there is.

Overall, Hacked: The Streamer is a well-put-together title; the story is engaging and keeps you guessing as you go along. Its storyline taps into people’s real emotions around online bullying and the danger of putting yourself in the public eye, a sick mother who needs to be looked after, and the realisation that you cannot always control the outcome of a situation. If you enjoy FMV games, you will enjoy this one, though there aren’t many hours of content. What’s there though, can be rewarding if you manage to sort out who the hacker is.

Written by: Mike Bridge